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Primary Documents - British Government Statement on the Execution of Captain Fryatt, August 1916

On 28 March 1915 Captain
Charles Fryatt, a British merchant captain, attempted - but failed - to ram
and sink a German submarine, U-33. This came in the wake of
repeated attempts by the German navy to sink his vessel - the Great Eastern
Railway Steamer Brussels sailing the Rotterdam/British east coast
route.

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Hailed by the Allied
nations as a hero - it was variously believed that he had succeeded in his
patriotic act, Fryatt was officially rewarded by the British government for
his actions.

Fryatt was however taken
prisoner by the Germans on a subsequent voyage and charged with being a
franc-tireur
- a most serious charge and one that carried the death sentence. So
began a war of words between the German and British governments over his
case. Britain argued that Fryatt had been acting in self-defence,
while Germany maintained that Fryatt's action in attempting to ram U-33
was undertaken without provocation.

In the event Fryatt was
tried and convicted by a German court and executed on 27 July 1916.
The case achieved widespread notoriety in Britain and Captain Fryatt's name
- and face, in newspapers, magazines and even bookmarks - was celebrated
throughout Britain.

Click here
to read the German government's official statement following Fryatt's
execution.
Click here to
read the response written by former British Prime Minister
Arthur Balfour.

Reproduced below is the
official British government statement regarding Fryatt's case.
Click here to read Germany's
reply.

Official British
Government Statement, August 1916

On March 28, 1915, a German
submarine sank the Falaba. It is well known that the Falaba
stopped when ordered to do so by the German aggressor. Nevertheless,
the German captain of the submarine did not give time for the passengers to
be put into boats, and torpedoed this great liner while non-combatants were
still on board.

One of those who were on
the deck describes the scene as follows:

The Commander of the
submarine ordered our Captain to get every passenger into the boats at
once, saying in good English: 'I am going to sink your ship.' Then
followed a terrible scene. Some of the boats were swamped and their
occupants thrown into the sea, several being drowned almost immediately.
Barely ten minutes after we received the order to leave the ship, and
before the last boat had been lowered, I heard a report, and saw our
vessel heel over. The pirates had actually fired a torpedo at her at
a range of 100 yards, when they could distinctly see a large number of
passengers and crew on board. It was a dastardly thing to do -
nothing but murder in cold blood.

One hundred and four men
and women lost their lives.

It was on this same Sunday,
March 28th, that Captain Fryatt met the U-33 in the North Sea.
In the afternoon, when on a voyage from Parkeston to Rotterdam, the
Brussels sighted a German submarine, at least three hundred feet long,
with a very high bow, a very large circular conning tower, and without
distinguishing marks, on her starboard bow.

Captain Fryatt soon
realized that the speed of the submarine was far greater than his own, and
that if he attempted to turn away, he could easily be torpedoed. The
submarine signalled him to stop, but his British courage revolted at the
thought of surrender, and the experience of German methods of warfare warned
him that surrender would be no guarantee that the lives of his crew would be
spared.

He determined therefore to
take the best chance of saving his ship, and to steer for the submarine in
order to force her to dive, and, if she were not quick enough in diving, to
ram her.

This was his undoubted
right under international law - to disregard her summons and resist her
attack to the best of his power. It was a contest of skill and courage
in which each side took their chance.

Captain Fryatt, therefore,
starboarded his helm, and gave orders to his engineers to make all possible
speed. He sent all the crew aft to a place of safety, in case the
submarine should fire upon him, and steered straight for the conning tower.

The latter, when she saw
that the Brussels would not surrender, but was bent upon exercising
her undoubted right of resistance, immediately submerged. The
Brussels saw her disappear about twenty yards ahead, and steered for the
place where she had been. Almost immediately her periscope came up
abreast of the Brussels, two feet out of the water. Captain
Fryatt did not feel his ship strike the submarine, but one of the firemen
felt a bumping sensation. The submarine reappeared with a decided
list, and afterwards vanished from view.

Captain Fryatt held his
course at top speed until he was safely within the territorial waters of
Holland.

The claim of the Wolff
Bureau that Captain Fryatt allowed the submarine to approach for examination
is utterly false, and the pretence of some German papers that he
surrendered, and afterwards attacked the U-33, or that he was guilty
of any deception or any underhand dealing, is equally untrue. These
false pleas can only be attributed to their desire to conceal a foul crime
under a cloak of lies.

Let us not be deceived into
thinking that the request to stop was any evidence of humane intention.
The Falabo stopped, and her list of dead is eloquent. Captain
Fryatt, already familiar with the designs of German submarines from his
previous adventure, sought to save his ship's company from a similar fate.

Did he do it, as the
Weser Zeitung of Germany pretends, "from ambition and lust of gain?"

No; though he is dead, his
comrades live, and through his courage and resource they have been saved the
fate of the women and children on the Lusitania and many other ships
which stopped and surrendered, and whose passengers, through the inhuman
conduct of a German submarine, were drowned at sea.

By his action Captain
Fryatt undoubtedly saved the lives of those under his charge. At the
date of this gallant act the Germans had already sunk without warning
twenty-two British merchant ships, and had attempted to sink many others.

The German Proclamation of
February 4th was an offer of attack without further notice to any merchant
vessel flying the British flag in those waters; and the Captain, in acting
as he did, did no more than defend himself against the illegally proffered
violence of the enemy.

The British Admiralty
presented Captain Fryatt with a gold watch, suitably inscribed, in
recognition of his services. This watch, and the watch awarded by the
Great Eastern Railway Company for his previous exploit, did not fall into
the hands of a pirate submarine, but are in the safe keeping of his widow,
to be an heirloom in his family.

The award of the watch by
the Admiralty was announced in the British House of Commons on April 28,
1915, by Dr. Macnamara, Secretary to the Admiralty, who mentioned, amongst
other merchant captains, the name of Captain Fryatt, as one who had baffled
a German submarine by his bravery and resource, and had been selected by the
Admiralty "as deserving of reward for specially meritorious services."

His Majesty, King George,
in a letter addressed to Mrs. Fryatt from Buckingham Palace, lately
expressed what will be the feeling of the whole world when he said:
"The action of Captain Fryatt in defending his ship against the attack of an
enemy submarine was a noble instance of the resource and self-reliance so
characteristic of his profession."

Captain Fryatt sailed from
the Hook of Holland on the evening of June 22, 1916, more than a year after
his last recorded encounter with a submarine. A friend who shook his
hand as he went on the bridge found him calm and cheerful as ever.

The Brussels had a
cargo of foodstuffs and some Belgian refugees on board. But when well
on her voyage to Tilbury she was captured by a flotilla of German torpedo
boats, and she was taken as a prize to Zeebrugge. It was reported at
the time that there was a suspicious character on board the Brussels,
who spoke German fluently, and was afterwards treated with the utmost
consideration by the Germans.

The Amsterdam Telegraaf
bears testimony to the quiet and dignified conduct of the crew and its
Captain after capture. It speaks of Captain Fryatt himself as standing
in the midst of his officers, his face as calm as if he were on the bridge,
comforting the weeping Belgian women with a kindly word, and thinking only
of others.

On the 1st of July, the
American Ambassador, in reply to an inquiry from the British Foreign Office,
assured Sir Edward Grey that the officers and crew of the Brussels were safe
and well, and that the Master of the vessel "desired that his wife might be
informed." Nobody suspected at that time the import and terrible
significance of those pathetic words.

It was not until the 16th
of July that the Government and public of Great Britain first learned, in
the columns of the Amsterdam Telegraaf, that Captain Fryatt was to be
tried by court-martial on a charge of ramming a German submarine. The
British Foreign Office immediately made inquiries of the American
Ambassador, and requested that proper steps might be taken for the Captain's
defence. The report in the Telegraaf was only too true.

We have no particulars of
the court-martial which was held at Bruges. It is not certain whether
any independent witnesses were present, and it is unlikely that the Germans
will ever disclose what took place there. Everything appears to have
been done in the dark and in haste, as by those who shunned the light of
publicity in the performance of their sinister work. We can only quote
the bald outlines of the German official telegram, which stated that:

On Thursday, at Bruges,
before the Court-Martial of the Marine Corps, the trial took place of
Captain Charles Fryatt, of the British steamer Brussels, which was brought
in as a prize.

A postponement of the trial
had been asked for; but this was refused, on the ground that "German
submarine witnesses could not be further detained"! Upon such an
outrageous pretext, the trial was immediately held, and Captain Fryatt was
"defended" by Major Neumann, "in civil life an attorney and Justizrat."

Under what principle of
international law was he tried? What was the nature of the
impeachment? What are the names of the judges who condemned him?

According to the German
official pronouncement, Captain Fryatt was condemned because:

Although he was not a
member of a combatant force, he made an attempt on the afternoon of March
28, 1915, to ram the German submarine, U-33, near the Maas Lightship.

That resistance to such an
attack is legitimate, is clear from the prize law of all the great states;
of the British Empire, the United States, Italy, Spain, and others. It
is even admitted by the German prize regulations; for in an appendix to
these, dated June 22, 1914, may be found the following clause:

If an armed enemy
merchant vessel offers armed resistance to the right of visit, search and
capture, the crew are to be treated as prisoners of war.

It is true that the German
regulation speaks of armed merchant vessels; but that can make no
difference. A merchant vessel is none the less a merchant vessel
because she is armed; her officers and crew do not become members of a
combatant force because the vessel carries guns for defence; a merchantman
is permitted to resist an enemy warship, not because she has any combatant
quality, but because she will be captured at the best, or if she meets a
German submarine, probably sunk without warning; and even capture is an act
of hostility to which a merchantman need not submit.

The justice of these
contentions has been admitted by an eminent German international lawyer, Dr.
Hans Wehberg, in his hook, Das Seekriegsrecht, published since the
outbreak of the present war. He writes:

In truth no single
example can be produced from international precedents in which the States
have held that resistance is not permissible. On the contrary, in
the celebrated decision of Lord Stowell in the case of the Catharina
Elizabeth resistance was declared permissible, and Article 10 of the
American Naval War Code takes up the same standpoint. By far the
greater number of authors and the Institute of International Law share
this view... The enemy merchant ship has then the right of defence against
an enemy attack, and this right she can exercise against visit, for this
is indeed the first act of capture.

The opinion that such
resistance is illegal is scarcely held outside Germany; it is of recent
growth; and its chief exponent is Dr. Schramm, who is legal adviser to the
German Admiralty. It is not difficult to conjecture that his opinion,
and the opinion of his friends, was first conceived at the time when Germany
was making her final preparations for an assault upon civilization.

Moreover, the German
Government, in a memorandum which it handed to neutral Powers on February
10, 1916, while maintaining that, in the view of Germany, merchant vessels
were not entitled to defend themselves, stated that: "It takes into
consideration also the contrary conception by treating their crews as
belligerents."

In the face of the horror
and incredulity of the whole world, which, despite a surfeit of German
barbarity, could scarcely comprehend this latest crime, the Germans have
made frantic efforts to justify this judicial murder. They have
justified it under a German prize rule relating to neutral ships! They
have argued that the good of their cause demanded it - a wicked argument
which can weigh with nobody outside Germany. They have argued further
that Captain Fryatt was a franc-tireur.

"One of the many nefarious
franc-tireur proceedings of the British Merchant Marine against our
war vessels," states the German official telegram, "has thus found a belated
but merited expiation."

During the Franco-German
War of 1870, various French irregular forces carried on an intermittent
warfare against the German army. Throughout the war the Germans shot
every such irregular soldier that fell into their hands. This brutal
conduct aroused the indignation of many peoples in many lands, and now, by
an article of the Hague regulations for the conduct of warfare on land, such
irregulars are entitled to be treated on the same footing as regular forces
when they are under a responsible commander, wear a distinctive badge, carry
arms openly, and conform with the laws of war.

Further, even the
requirements of a responsible commander and a distinctive badge are
dispensed with, where the population rises spontaneously to resist an
invader, and in this case unauthorized bodies of men, armed and obeying the
laws of war, are entitled, if captured, to be treated as prisoners of war.

Here then is an exception
to the general rule that a fighter must be a member of the authorized armed
forces in order to make good his claim to be treated as a prisoner. A
similar exception has existed from time immemorial at sea. And indeed
the difficulty felt by the Hague Conference in granting to irregulars on
land the right to be treated as prisoners does not exist in the case of a
merchant seaman. He and his ship are on the open sea, and in full
view; he cannot change his clothes, and lose his identity amid a crowd of
civilians; he cannot take his enemy unawares. From the moment when he
is attacked, he is permitted to defend himself, and his attacker is at no
disadvantage.

Every German submarine in
the war area may be assumed by a British merchant captain to be engaged in
carrying out the orders of the German "Higher Command." The presence
of such a submarine in the neighbourhood of a British merchant ship is an
offer to strike coupled with the capacity to fulfil the threat.

It is, in other words, an
offensive act, for visit is, as Dr. Wehberg says, the first act of capture.
Under these circumstances the captain of a merchant ship may defend his
ship, and is not a franc-tireur if he does so; when captured, he must
be treated as a prisoner of war, Captain Fryatt defended his ship; he was
not captured; at a later date he fell into the enemy's hands, and has been
shot because he dared to exercise his undoubted legal right. We say
"undoubted," because no doubt arose until the apostles of German militarism
and of the "freedom of the seas" were perfecting their final plans.

But what need is there to
pay the German Government the compliment of supposing that it has acted
under any mistaken view of law? Consistently with itself, it has but
complied with its own military needs. It has now become a habit in
Germany to reckon as a franc-tireur any class of persons who are
particularly obnoxious to the advancement of German militarism.

For instance, the
Rheinisch Westfalische Zeitung of August 1, 1916, published an article
calling upon the German Government to treat American volunteers fighting
with Allied troops against Germany as francs-tireurs and, when
captured, to shoot or, preferably, to hang them.

On the 30th of July the
Telegraaf learned that Captain Fryatt had been shot towards the evening
of the Thursday before, on an enclosed part of the harbour grounds at
Bruges, and that an Alderman of the town had attended as witness.

The news of his death was
officially confirmed by a telegram from the American Ambassador. No
further details are known; nor probably will they ever be known. The
German Government had learnt enough wisdom from its execution of Edith
Cavell to know that such things are better done in secret, though they had
not learned sufficient humanity, nor won enough sense of justice nor common
sense, to feel that such things cannot be done at all, without outrage to
the feelings of the civilized world.

The Germans well knew that
this latest judicial murder would arouse the indignation of the whole world;
but they were resolved, if possible, to discourage imitation of Captain
Fryatt's gallantry at all costs.

"Doubtless there will be
among England's sympathizers all the world over a storm of indignation
against German barbarism similar to that roused by the case of Miss Cavell.
That must not disturb us," wrote the German Kolnische Volkszeitung of
July 29, 1916.

The Volkszeitung was
not disappointed. A shudder of loathing and detestation, of horror and
incredulity ran through every neutral country, the British Empire, and the
countries of our Allies.

The universal verdict was
that the barbarities of the world's past, even of the German past, were
outdone. The voice of the New York Herald was raised in protest
against a "CROWNING GERMAN ATROCITY." The New York Times saw in
the shooting of Captain Fryatt "a deliberate murder - a trifle to the
Government that has so many thousands to answer for."

In Holland, the Nieuwe
Rotterdamsche Courant of July 29th condemned the outrage, and said:

At the time that the
Captain of the Brussels made his unsuccessful attempt, the submarine war
was being carried on in the most brutal manner in contempt of all rules of
humanity. The mere sighting of a German submarine meant death for
hundreds who are now called 'francs-tireurs' in the German
communiqué. To claim for oneself the right to kill hundreds of
civilians out of hand, but to brand as a franc-tireur the civilian
who does not willingly submit to execution, amounts, in our opinion, to
measuring justice with a different scale, according to whether it is to be
applied to oneself or to another. This is, in our view,
arbitrariness and injustice. And that touches us even in the midst
of all the horrors of the war. It shocks the neutrals, and arouses
fresh bitterness and hatred in the enemy.

A Swiss paper, the
Journal de Geneve, denounces the German crime and says: "It is monstrous
to maintain that armed forces have a right to murder civilians but that
civilians are guilty of a crime in defending themselves."